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How thoroughly versed is the “Mad Men” writing team in the history of New York? If you’ve seen Sunday night’s episode, you’ll recall it started with a tense meeting between Pete Campbell and Paul Kinsey and executives from Madison Square Garden, who hope that the city’s denizens will warm to their plans to demolish Penn Station and replace it with a new entertainment arena. (Wonder how that turned out?) Among the negative responses to the plan that the executives discuss is an article from The New York Times written by Ada Louise Huxtable, the future Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic.

The article cited in this scene, called “How to Kill a City,” really did run in The Times on May 5, 1963, following the City Planning Committee’s decision that January to tear down Penn Station, and yes, Ms. Huxtable’s commentary really was that pointed. (“It is a poor society indeed,” she wrote, “that can’t pay for these amenities; that has no money for anything except expressways to rush people out of our dull and deteriorating cities.”)

New York was a town that had never been much obsessed with a sense of permanence and demolition crews were routinely reducing splendid old buildings to rubble when, in early 1962, Mayor Robert Wagner created the Landmarks Preservation Commission to protect “structures and areas of historic of esthetic importance.”

But by then it was already too late to save Pennsylvania Station, and many blamed Wagner for having been insufficiently attentive to the city’s save-the-station activists as they protested the grand old lady’s imminent demise.

The Pennsylvania Railroad had for years wanted this costly white elephant off its hands, and now the Pennsy had signed an agreement with the people who were building a new Madison Square Garden and there was no longer anything to be done for Charles McKim’s neoclassic masterwork, which began falling to the wrecking ball in October 1963.

SHAME, read the signs carried by the silent marchers as demolition began.

“In the years to come,” mourned commission director James Van Derpool, “we will be consumed with regret for allowing this supreme example of the architecture of the period to be destroyed.”

He was right.

Meanwhile, directly as a result of the Penn Station tragedy, the City Council soon undertook to pass legislation giving some measure of official standing to the landmarks board’s recommendations.

But Penn Station’s proud granite columns already lay in pieces in New Jersey’s Secaucus Meadows, where they had been dumped as landfill.

How Penn Station might have looked

In Toronto we have an extraordinary building called Commerce Court built in c1930 and later redeveloped in the 1970's. The main banking hall was also modeled like Penn Station was, after ancient Rome's Baths of Caracalla. While Toronto lost thousands of buildings during the urban renewal phase of the mid 20th century the Bank of Commerce was saved and is nothing short of spectacular, much like Penn Station was.

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Last edited by brucebelltours; November 19th, 2009 at 05:55 PM.
Reason: adding more pictures